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    Old Bones: A Casey Templeton Mystery
    Old Bones: A Casey Templeton Mystery
    Old Bones: A Casey Templeton Mystery
    Ebook130 pages1 hour

    Old Bones: A Casey Templeton Mystery

    By Gwen Molnar

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    About this ebook

    Casey Templeton is in a bind when he must foil a burglary of dinosaur bones.

    While helping with a real dinosaur dig at the world-famous Royal Tyrrell Museum, Casey Templeton finds a piece of dinosaur tooth. Excited, he spends all afternoon looking for the rest of the tooth, but all he ends up getting is a nasty sunburn. Lying in his hotel room that night, trying to recover, he sees and hears two men in a nearby room planning a robbery of precious artifacts from the Tyrrell.

    Later, Casey tells the museum’s curator (and old family friend), Dr. Norman, what he has seen and heard. Dr. Norman hires Casey to keep a watch out at the museum for the robbers. No luck.

    As the summer comes to an end, Casey and his friend Mandy decide to relax and take a bicycle jaunt north of Drumheller. But on the road they accidentally meet up with the conspirators and soon find themselves in a grim situation. Casey has to use all his ingenuity and skills to escape so he can try to help thwart the planned heist. Can he do it?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDundurn
    Release dateSep 24, 2014
    ISBN9781459714069
    Old Bones: A Casey Templeton Mystery
    Author

    Gwen Molnar

    Gwen Molnar is a poet, painter, and writer of children's fiction, including Hate Cell, the first Casey Templeton Mystery, three poetry collections for children, as well as many other books. Her family memoir, At Home in Old Strathcona, will be published in 2014. She lives in Edmonton, Alberta.

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      Book preview

      Old Bones - Gwen Molnar

      Author

      Chapter One

      Casey had to have it. He’d never wanted anything so much in his life. He wanted it so badly his heart was pounding and his palms were sweating.

      I’ll give you thirty bucks for it. He was rubbing the curved, two-inch-long end piece of a dinosaur tooth with his thumb. Its ridged surface was cool to the touch and it fitted exactly one end of the jagged inch-long piece of tooth he’d picked up a few minutes earlier. He just had to have it.

      Fifty. Mike sounded like he meant it.

      From the day Mike O’Malley had moved with his family to Richford, just two months before, he and Casey had connected as if they’d known each other all their lives. They couldn’t have looked less alike: Casey, with his tumble of white-blond hair, his blue eyes, his skinny frame; and Mike, with his dark hair, freckles, deep brown eyes, and sturdy build.

      I come from Black Irish stock, he’d told Casey when they’d first met.

      What does that mean, Black Irish? Casey had asked.

      Well, my dad says we’re descended from a bunch of sailors from the Spanish Armada who got shipwrecked on Irish shores way back when. They had dark eyes and dark complexions, and black hair like me. There are a lot of other explanations as to why we’re called that — I checked the web — but I’ll stick with Dad’s version.

      Forty, Casey offered. It’ll be all I’ll have left when I’ve bought the stuff I want.

      His parents had given him a hundred dollars spending money for this two-day field trip of Mr. Deverell’s grade ten science class to the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller. Casey planned to use the rest of his money for a book on fossils, and models of two of the museum’s most famous exhibits, a huge Tyrannosaurus rex and a not-quite-so-huge Albertosaurus.

      The class had left Richford at 7:00 that morning for the sixty-some kilometre bus ride south. Half the class were going to be spending the field trip in and around the museum, with just an hour’s dig each day, but the first day, Mr. Deverell had reserved ten places for his most interested students at what was called a Day Dig — part of the Royal Tyrrell Museum’s Explorers’ Program — and Casey and Mike were two of the ten.

      They’d stowed their gear in the Hoodoo Hotel’s locked storage room early in the morning and would be returning there at the end of the day to eat and sleep. Sometimes whole classes of students slept right in the museum, in the shadow of the gigantic dinosaurs, but other schools had booked to stay there long ago, so Mr. Deverell had reserved space for his class at the Hoodoo.

      At 8:30, Casey and Mike and the other eight Richford kids met up with the Day Dig staff at the main entrance to the museum. The staff gave them a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum’s fossil collection, and instructions on how they were to go about exploring the dig.

      Every fossil you see here, Dr. Spain, the dig’s leader, told them, was mapped and collected just the way you’ll be doing it on our dig today.

      A short bus ride to the quarry’s parking lot, followed by a ten-minute hike up a short incline and they were at the dig site in the Red Deer River Valley.

      Can you believe, Mike asked, this is a seventy-million-year-old rock formation and dinosaurs used to roam around here then?

      Oh give me a home, where the dinosaurs roam, Casey whispered under his breath.

      Shush and listen, said Mike.

      The Red Deer Valley has several bonebeds preserved over an extensive area, Dr. Spain was saying. "Often the majority of the bones come from a single type of dinosaur, like the Centrosaurus of Dinosaur Provincial Park."

      What’s in ‘our’ bonebed? Casey wanted to know.

      An assemblage of ‘teenage’ duckbilled dinosaurs, Dr. Spain said. "And along with the juvenile dinosaurs, we’ve also uncovered numerous teeth from carnivorous dinosaurs such as the Albertosaurus."

      You must have a huge staff to cover such a big area, Mike said.

      The problem is, we don’t, Dr. Spain replied, shaking his head. And that’s where teams like yours come in. By bringing in ten or twelve people each day to help, many times more work gets done. You’ll be conducting real research with palaeontologists — remember what we told you this morning about how you handle what you find. As you uncover fossils at this site, you help us gain a better understanding of the dinosaurs and the other animals that lived in this area. The more we scientists know about the past, the better we’re able to understand the present. End of lecture. Let’s go to work.

      Casey and Mike had headed away from the rest and both had got lucky.

      Give me the forty, Mike said, and ten more when we get home, and it’s yours. Mike liked science but he liked music even more — and the CDs he wanted cost fifty dollars.

      All right. Casey nodded. My wallet’s in my pack at the hotel; I’ll give you the money later.

      You know you can’t keep what you find anyway, Mike reminded Casey.

      I know, said Casey, but I want to hold all the pieces of a real dinosaur tooth in my hand; and the museum will put my name as the finder on a card in that fossil room.

      They worked on as the sun rose higher and higher.

      After a while, Mike called to Casey. They’re going to be serving us lunch in the Museum Cafeteria at twelve. Mike was always hungry. Let’s get back to the bus and get in the shade for a while.

      Okay. Casey put his water bottle down to mark his spot.

      Lunch was a better one than Casey was expecting, and being in the air-conditioned museum was a real treat. He was kind of wishing he’d opted for only the short dig, but the feel of the tooth pieces in his pocket made him decide he was glad he was going back to hunt for the rest of the tooth.

      Back at the dig, Dr. Spain reminded them of the afternoon’s schedule.The bus leaves for the museum at 2:50, but you’re welcome to spend the rest of the day at the museum.

      Mike wanted to talk to one of the staff, so Casey went back to his spot alone. Before restarting his search, he took a drink of his now lukewarm water and looked around.

      This is one strange place, he thought, no wonder it’s called the badlands. He’d read that early French trappers and traders had called the Whiter River area of South Dakota les mauvaises terres — the badlands — and before them, the Sioux Indians called them Mako Sica, meaning land bad. The name had stuck for all such landscapes in the western United States and in this part of Alberta.

      Casey pulled his broad-brimmed hat further down on his forehead (Mr. Deverell said they couldn’t go on the dig without one). Gazing over the landscape, he took another swallow of water. He remembered the moment on the ride into Drumheller when, at a turn in the road, the landscape changed from open, sweeping prairie to this enchanted, mysterious valley, with its hoodoos and mounds and hollows and hills and arroyos all carved by wind and weather. An alien world, Casey thought.

      He got down on his knees right where he’d found his piece of tooth. Should have worn long pants like they suggested we do, he thought. He brushed away the dust and small stones that covered the ground; everything was dry, parched, and barren. His knees began to hurt so he took off his T-shirt and made a roll of it for a kneeler. Now his knees didn’t hurt, but his back was getting the full brunt of the rays of the semi-desert sun. He knew he’d get a sunburn. With his fair skin, he always did, so he’d put lots of sunscreen on his face and neck.

      It’s probably worn off by now, he thought.

      Was a sunburned back worth the chance of finding all the pieces of a real dinosaur tooth?

      Yes, he said right out loud, it is.

      Casey drank a gulp of water, now almost hot. It was very quiet as he worked alone in his area of the quarry and he jumped when a deep voice shouted across the rocks, Casey, put your shirt back on, this sun will fry you.

      Okay, he said, watching as Dr. Spain moved away to another helper. I’ll put it on in a few minutes, he added to himself. Instead, because the sweat was trickling down from beneath his hat, he took it off, putting it on the ground, top down so the inside could dry.

      As he patiently searched every inch, going round and round in ever-widening circles, Casey’s mind wandered back to his family’s move to Richford when his father retired from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police almost a year ago.

      His parents had been so happy to return to their hometown, Richford — Paradise

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